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In Kansas, where the silo cutters droned, where plowing was under way for 1941's winter wheat, where upland corn burned out in July's drought, where the sorghums were good and cattle brought the best price in years, there were arguments hotter than political disputes over the best kind of wheat—Tenmarq, which the State College has pushed, Chiefkan, which farmers found more profitable. In Ohio, with its 255,000 farms (1.03 autos per farm, .66 tractors, .31 trucks), where late spring rains delayed corn and soybean planting, where the corn crop was down by 20,000,000 bushels—there was talk of a new 40-inch combine and of what the weather will be like for next month's delayed harvest.
In Colorado, ranchers were getting in hay for the long winter snows; in Texas they were pitching horseshoes, getting ready for the fall roundup, looking over some of the finest Hereford cattle in the world at an exposition in Marfa in the Big Bend country. In Louisiana, where a Caribbean hurricane spread havoc last month, flooding out rice, breaking sugar cane, killing livestock, cotton picking started last week, the sugar mills tuned up, the first of the State's 47 fairs were opening, and at night the levees were studded with the bright fires of fish fries and shrimp boils.
There, too, the farm political scene was more animated than anywhere in the U. S. Governor Sam Jones at the Chicago convention snorted: "I'm 1,000% against Wallace." (Six years ago Henry Wallace said, "Cotton is an efficient industry and so is hog raising. Sugar is an inefficient industry. ... I do not believe Louisiana sugar . . . should be put out of business all at once. That would be hard on human rights. . . ." Four years ago the sugar parish of Assumption voted for Landon.) Scholarly, weather-beaten Planter David Washington Pipes, venerated in the sugar country because he grew the cane which routed mosaic disease (as Wallace made his reputation in the corn belt by helping develop hybrid corn), bolted to Willkie, ran for Congress on the Republican ticket, and his regular Democratic opponent withdrew in his favor.
But nowhere else was the farm political picture so clear. Colorado and Texas cattlemen were vehemently opposed to the Administration farm program—but in both State's the farmers who far outnumbered them were not. The feeling for Wallace, vague, contradictory, possessive, was compounded of many things—admiration for him personally, respect for his honest expression of his views, a conviction that he is sincerely for them, a belief that they may criticize him in a way that his political opponents should not.
But in the average U. S. county there are now about 100 agents of various Government farm agencies (REA, FSCC, SCS, AAA, the Farm Security Administration); farmers' dislike for red tape and regimentation has not decreased; farmers' complaints range from charges that Queen Anne's lace grows on the land set aside from production to the charge that the grain stored in the ever normal granary breeds insects who never were given such a bounty to fatten on before. Since debt is a reality to foreclosure-conscious farmers, fear of the mounting public debt means more than it does in the cities.